Total Immersion

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I began this collection of stories while in high school and finished it in college.  The earliest stories in the book are “And Also Much Cattle” and “Variant Text” which I wrote when I was seventeen.  I will never forget what it was like to write those stories.  I felt such a sense of discovery.  As I wrote along, I'd start laughing at my own words, and I thought in surprise, I'm funny!  Or I'd write a paragraph describing what my character Cecil Birnbaum was thinking and I'd say to myself, Oh, I understand him.  As a 17, 18, 20 year old writer I was an odd combination of confidence and innocence.  I was almost too young to know what fear was.